Friction (Red Hot Private Eye, Novella, Vol. 2) (4 page)

“What?” The shock and alarm in Raiza’s voice surprised Mateo.

He had so rarely heard her express those emotions that it made him want to rush into the hotel and…
hug her. Damn, where had that come from? Over the years Mateo had gotten urges, desires to do all sorts of physical things to or with Raiza...but hugging? Where the
hell
had that come from?

“What happened? Why didn’t anyone call me?” Raiza could not believe that she was just hearing about this now.

Her cousin Juan shrugged. “I don’t know. I found out because my mom called me this morning, when I saw I got a text from you, before I read it, I thought it was about Tia Margie. I guess she had a stroke, or something,
I’m not sure. I just know that Tio Frank couldn’t wake her up and called an ambulance.”

The hard edges of the keycard that Juan had just handed Raiza dug into her skin as she gripped it tightly. She needed to go and do her job but she also needed to find out if her aunt was okay. “Is she awake now?”

“I don’t know,” Juan said, not seeming overly concerned.

“Well what did the doctors say?” Raiza was quickly losing her patience for her young,
frustrating
, cousin.

“I don’t know.” Juan shrugged his shoulders again.

Okay, new tactic. “What exactly did your mom tell you, J?”

“She said ‘Your Tia Margie wouldn’t wake up this morning so your Tio Frank took her to the hospital and now I have to make all the cookies for the bake sale at St. Anthony’s. Can you believe that? Aye Dios mio, like I don’t have better things to do.’”

Raiza narrowed her eyes at her cousin, “You don’t have to be a smart ass, J.”

He lifted his arms as if he
didn’t know what she was talking about. “What?! That’s
exactly
what she said.”

Fine, she would just have to call her uncle and find out her condition and what hospital her aunt was staying at so she could send flowers, or wait…balloons. Her aunt was allergic to flowers.

“Raiza,” Mateo’s deep timbre in her earpiece interrupted her thought.

“What?” she snapped.

“I said that is exactly-” her cousin tried to explain again.

Raiza held up her hand, “No, not you.”

“Time,” Mateo
irritatingly
prompted.

Juan’s face scrunched up and he turned his head slowly from side to side. Then looked back at his cousin and spoke slowly, “Rizy we’re the only ones here. You see El Cuco or something?”

‘El Cuco’ was an urban legend that all of her cousins had grown up hearing about and fearing. They would all tease each other, saying that El Cuco was standing behind them or pretending to speak to the air, they would say they were talking to El Cuco.

Raiza rolled her eyes before she could help herself. Shit. Now she would have to reset the running clock that tracked how long she had refrained from
rolling her eyes.

Well, she could add that to the growing list of things that made her wish she had stayed in bed today.

Raiza leaned forward and gave her little cousin a kiss on the cheek. “Are you gonna make it next Sunday?”

Now it was her cousin’s turn to roll his eyes, “Yes, Mom.”

“Good.” Happiness filled Raiza’s chest but she kept her expression unreadable. Every Sunday she held ‘family dinner' at her house. Back East when she had been growing up, her family all got together after church and had a big family dinner each week. Well, it was more than dinner really—with over forty cousins, twelve aunts and uncles, and assorted significant others, it had been more like a weekly feast.

Out here in Southern California, it was only her and three of her cousins, but she had tried to keep the tradition alive. Sometimes they would all show up, but usually only one or two of them would make it—they were all young and liked to party on the weekends! The last two Sundays, none of them had shown.

As she turned to make her way to room 418 she tried to get her mind back in the game. She needed to erase any thoughts or emotions that might be bubbling up inside of her. She was a machine. A clear-thinking, decisive, focused machine.

Two men in designer suits were walking towards her in the narrow hallway. She felt their assessing stares. She nodded to them in acknowledgment and noted that the one on the right
wasn’t bad looking. Tall, broad shoulders, dark-hair, and intense eyes. He was definitely her ‘type’. He was setting off her alpha-male radar in a serious way.

Too bad she was working.

She passed them both and, due to the narrowness of the corridor, she brushed against Mr. Alpha. They were chest to chest, thigh to thigh. She pretty much made full body contact with him. She was waiting for a zing of awareness to spread through her. Nothing.

Instead of excitement or titillation, what she felt was disappointment. It seemed that, although she wished it
was otherwise, there was no way to control chemistry. It was either there or not. And she had found out that even if she was attracted to someone it did not necessarily mean that she had chemistry with them. What she needed was both crazy attraction and explosive chemistry.

Seriously, was that too much to ask for?

For some reason Mateo’s face popped into her head. Hmm, probably just because she was on assignment with him. Right? Yes, that had to be the reason.

She pressed the keycard into the door and the green light lit up, granting her access to the room.

“I’m in,” she announced to Mateo, keeping him abreast of her status.

“Copy that, Rizy,” Mateo's teasing tone was obvious as he used the nickname that
only
her family ever dared to use. She usually set people straight if they thought it was okay to call her that. Normally she hated it. For some reason hearing Mateo say it didn’t bother her.

Weird.

Walking around the space, she immediately started scanning for areas in which she could place devices. It wasn't as simple as it sounded. The spots needed to have clear fields of vision, but also be reasonably hidden, and the cameras had to be placed at very specific intervals and angles so that there wouldn’t be any blind spots.

Raiza scowled. The room
was beautifully decorated with clean, minimalistic, modern furnishings. That was great for guests. Not so great for hiding spy gear.

Also
the room was shaped in an ‘L’, which meant she needed to put in extra equipment. She opened her purse and began digging out what she needed. After selecting the first mini camera she moved to the corner to mount it on the edge of a light fixture.

She was trying to stay 100% focused on the
task at hand, but her mind kept drifting back to what her cousin had told her. How could no one have remembered to call her and let her know? The logical part of her understood that she had a large family and that each one of her aunts and uncles had their own children to notify. That knowledge didn’t change the fact that she had never felt like more of an outsider than she did right this minute.

She
wasn't on anyone's call list. She wasn't anyone's child.

Thank
God she had seen her cousin today, otherwise she would still have no idea that her aunt was ill. If her aunt was going to be in the hospital more than just a day or two, then Raiza needed to go back and see her. Maybe she would ask Juan if he wanted to fly back with her.

“So you gonna call that guy?” Mateo asked in her earpiece.

“Maybe,” Raiza replied.

“Really?” he replied flatly. “So, that’s all it takes, huh?”

“What are you talking about?” Raiza was confused as to why Mateo would care about her family business in the first place, and a little surprised that he would be so insensitive about her aunt’s condition.

“Nothing,” irritation coming through his strained voice.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing.” Raiza hated when people brought something up and then dropped it before saying what they
really
wanted to say. “If you have something to say to me then say it.”

Mateo was quiet—which was extremely out of character for him. This day just kept getting weirder.

After placing the mini cam on the lights Raiza said, “Eyes are live.”

“Copy,” Mateo replied in a clipped tone.

Deciding to ignore his attitude, for now at any rate, Raiza pulled out her screen and logged into the camera monitoring system so she could make sure that there were no blind spots. Unfortunately, there were. Several, as a matter of fact.

Today was just not her day.

Mateo watched on his screens as Raiza worked on putting the last camera in place. She had been in there for over an hour now, and, although they did have audio covered, visual coverage had proven to be quite challenging. It had been trial and error. The places that covered the most
weren’t hidden and the places that she was able to conceal the devices left too many blind spots.

He moved to adjust his
pants which had grown quite tight over the last hour. In her attempts to place the necessary equipment around the room, Raiza had bent every which way you could bend your body—up, down, over, under, even a twist here and there—which had resulted in him getting a raging boner. He felt like a pervert sitting in a van, watching a hot girl on several large screens, and getting
excited
.

His body’s uncontrollable reaction to her had made him even more frustrated than he already was since hearing that she would “maybe” be calling the elevator-penthouse tool. He knew he had no right to ask her about it. When the question had left his
mouth he had immediately wished he could call it back.

He sounded like a jealous boyfriend.
And those were two things that Mateo had made it a rule never to be. He never got jealous. And he was never in relationships long enough that girls would consider him their “boyfriend”.

Raiza muttered a curse word under her breath and Mateo saw that she
wasn’t able to disguise the camera in the vent.

“Try the plant,” he offered.

She ignored him and he saw that she was still fighting with the vent.

“Raiza.”

“I’ve got it,” she said defensively.

Mateo watched as she took out a small
screw driver and began unscrewing the corners of the metal vent. He shook his head.
Stubborn much?

He was just about to tell her that she needed to speed this along when he felt the same uneasy feeling he had experienced when they had arrived. He quickly scanned the monitors and saw that a black SUV was pulling up in front of the plaza. Mateo felt his body tense as a man stepped out of the back. He roughly resembled Maldonado.

Zooming in on the man’s face he ran an identity check through face recognition software. It came back as a 99% match.

“Maldonado’s here.
I repeat, Maldonado’s here.”

“Has he entered the building?” Raiza asked calmly.

“No.”

“Then I have time,” her voice sounded sure and strong. She had just taken the vent
off of the wall and was placing the camera inside.

What the hell was wrong with her
?! She needed to get out of there. Now.

“Raiza.”
Mateo felt his heart slamming into his chest, “Time to go.”

She ignored him…completely.

Mateo kept his eyes on Maldonado. He was on the phone, pacing back and forth. He didn’t look happy.

He stopped abruptly when a black sedan arrived. He then turned and started walking toward the hotel.

“He’s headed in,” Mateo informed Raiza.

“Copy that.”

Two men exited the sedan. They seemed familiar to Mateo. But he only saw the sides of their faces before they headed purposely toward the entrance to the hotel. Following the same path that Maldonado had just taken.

Luckily, a woman crossing the street illegally caused a driver in a Porsche Sportster to honk his horn. The sound made all three men turn around and Mateo quickly took a screen shot. He ran the facial recognition software as the three men entered the glass doors of the front entrance.

“He’s inside the building,” Mateo’s voice was thick with stress.

“Copy,” Raiza said as Mateo watched her screwing the corners of the vent into place.

Mateo looked down at his watch, she had maybe two minutes. She needed to go.

“Get out,” He instructed harshly.

The screw that she was working on fell to the floor.

“Leave it and get out,” Mateo could not believe that she was still in the hotel room.

She bent down and once again began screwing it in.

“You don’t have time. You have maybe 90 seconds. You need to go.
Now.”

“Almost there,” her voice sounded cool as a cucumber.

Did she not understand the kind of person that they were dealing with?

His computer dinged, alerting Mateo that the program had matched the images he had scanned, one with an accuracy of 92% and the other with 89%. Those were good numbers considering that both men were wearing sunglasses.

The men’s names were Julio Rodriguez and Raul Pena. The names sounded familiar as well. Mateo quickly ran them and the results instantly showed that they were captains in the Trejo cartel.

“Raiza. Maldonado is not meeting a woman. He’s headed your way with two captains in the Trejo cartel.” Mateo looked at his watch. “You have under a minute.”

He watched as Raiza finished screwing in the last of the screws then checked the feed on her phone.

He could barely control his anger, “Get. Out. Now.”

“I’m switching to black out,” she said as all of the monitors went dark.

Shit. He knew that it was the right thing to do and it pissed him off even more that he hadn’t thought about it. When dealing with people like Rodriquez and Pena it was common practice to switch all of the equipment you plant in a room off and then turn it on remotely after the occupants have been inside several minutes. That way if they did a sweep of the room prior to conducting whatever business they had the devices wouldn’t be detected.

But now
the only contact that Mateo had to Raiza was her earpiece. He heard rustling sounds of clothes and then water running, it sounded like a shower.

He heard Raiza start singing. What was she doing? Did she have a death wish?

After several seconds he heard men’s voices, but couldn’t quite make them out. Then he heard Raiza scream. Not a scared-for-your-life panicked scream. A what-the-hell mad followed immediately by her yelling, “Aye, Dios mío! ¡Fuera de aquí! Estoy desnuda! ¡Fuera!”

For a moment there was only static. When it
cleared the signal started going in and out. He could hear bits and pieces of Raiza continuing to yell. Loudly.

Then everything went silent.

The earpiece must have gotten wet when she pulled that stupid stunt. Mateo knew logically that he should give her time. She obviously had a plan. She was not only one of the most intelligent people he knew she was also street smart and capable.

Still, every instinct he had was screaming for him to go in and save her. Fuck. He knew he should, but he
couldn’t just wait in the van. Not when she was up there with three extremely dangerous men.

He was stepping out of the van when his phone beeped. It was a text from Raiza.

In the elevator. Lights on in two.

How the hell
had she gotten in the elevator that fast? He climbed back into the van and set the timer on his watch for 120 seconds. If those screens didn’t come on before it hit ‘0’ he was going in.

He watched the darkened screens. He
didn’t hear anything but the pounding of his heart and his breaths coming in hard short pants. He sat. Waiting.

The seconds ticked by. 10, 9, 8, 7,
6…and then the screens came up. He saw the three men laughing as they sat around the living area in chairs. After listening for a minute, Mateo was able to pick out enough words to understand the gist of what they thought was so funny which was “the angry naked girl”.

Just as he was about to call the agency to have someone translate what they else they were saying so he could make sure that Raiza was okay, he saw her strolling out of the front of the hotel with the manager. Hair dripping wet, causing her silk shirt to leave nothing to the imagination. The manager looked like one of those cartoon wolves whose eyes bug out and tongue rolls from their mouth when they see a juicy steak.

Mateo’s reaction to seeing Raiza was quite a bit different than the hotel managers. Upon seeing that she was okay Mateo felt himself instantly relax. His breathing returned to normal. His blood pressure came back down. All he felt now was relief. Oh, and anger.

Yeah, he was
definitely
pissed.